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The UK university system is facing trouble on more than a few fronts. Some are struggling full stop as we note talk that they will not be bailed out. That comes on top of the issue of student loans and debt which makes me wonder how useful a degree is these days? Especially at a time of struggling real wages. Although wages for some do not seem to be a problem. From UK Parliament in June of this year.

A table of vice-chancellors’ salaries in the Times Higher Education in June 2017 showed that Dame Glynis Breakwell, the vice-chancellor of the University of Bath was the highest paid university vice-chancellor in the UK; in 2016-17 she was paid a salary of £451,000. The table showed that vice-chancellors at six other universities also earned over £400,000 in that year.

Average pay was found to be £290,000 including pension contributions. You may recall that the University Superannuation Scheme became a hot topic for a while as there were strikes after suggestions that defined benefits needed to end. That was eventually resolved with higher contributions ( but not as high as originally suggested). Previously the total was 26% of salary split 18% employer and 8% employee.

The panel recommended that DB pensions could continue to be offered with contributions rising to 29 per cent — significantly lower than the 36.6 per cent from April 2020 proposed by USS, based on the valuation as it stands. ( Financial Times)

As an aside it was a shame that the Bank of England was not contacted as its research could be used to show that in fact such pensions have benefited from its policies. In spite of course of that fact that its Chief Economist Andy Haldane confessed to not understanding them. Oh well!

Moving on, payoffs to Vice-Chancellors had become an issue such as the £429,000 payoff at Bath Spa, £230,000 at the University of Sussex, and £186,876 at Birmingham City University. Coming back to pay the HM Parliament research showed that Vice-Chancellor pay had risen at an annual rate of 3.2% when other academic staff were restricted to 0.7%.

Student Debt

A glimpse of a potential future can be seen in the United States. Last night the US Federal Reserve updated us on total student debt at the end of the third quarter and it was US $1.563 trillion. One perspective is provided by the number below it for total motor loans which is a relatively mere £1.142.8 trillion. In terms of past comparisons the number for 2013 was £1.145.6 trillion for US student loans.

Noah Opinion on Bloomberg looked at it like this.

Many educated millennials would likely agree — since 2006, student debt has approximately doubled as a share of the economy……..The increase seems to have paused in the past two years, possibly due to the economic recovery (which allows students and their families to pay more tuition out of current income) and a modest decline in college enrollment. But the burden is still very large, and interest rates on student-loan debt are fairly high.

His chart shows student debt being around 7.5% of US Gross Domestic Product and I can update his view because unless the US economy is growing at an annual rate of 5.6% then the burden is rising again.

Also the repayment issue is similar to that we have and indeed are experiencing in the UK.

Education researcher Erin Dunlop Velez crunched data that was recently released by the Department of Education, and found that only half of students who went to college in 1995-6 had paid off their loans within 20 years. Given the vast increase in the size of loans since then, repayment rates are likely to be even worse if nothing is done. Velez also found that default rates are considerably higher than had been thought.

There is another familiar feature.

What’s more, student lending has almost certainly contributed to the rise in college tuition, which has outpaced overall inflation by a lot. When the government lends students money, or encourages private lenders to do the same, it increases demand for college, pushing up the price.

In the UK a lot of the inflation came in one go.

In the 2012/13 academic year, students beginning their studies could be charged up to a maximum fee of £9000 for first year courses compared with a maximum of £3375 in
2011/12 ( Office for National Statistics).

Whilst the weighting for university fees is low the substantial rise had an impact on the overall numbers.

In total, university tuition fees for UK and EU students added 0.31 percentage points to the change in CPI
inflation between September and October 2012. This was the largest component of the rise in the headline rate from 2.2 to 2.7%.

The CPI measure was particularly affected as it includes international and European Union students whereas the RPI only has UK ones meaning that the weight is around three times higher. That becomes quite an irony as we note the invariably higher ( ~ 1% per annum) RPI is used in the interest-rate on student loans. The road from being “not a national statistic” to being useful is short when it is something the public are paying or indeed Bank of England pensioners are receiving.

Comment

Let me start with some welcome good news. The Times Higher Education rankings show Oxford University at number one with Cambridge second and Imperial College ninth. My alma mater the LSE slide in at number 26. So we are getting something right as whilst it feels by hook or by crook our universities are highly regarded around the world. I think we do that a lot as we focus on issues ( the impact of the PPE degree course at Oxford on our political class) and maybe lose vision on the wider picture. Our institutions are often highly regarded around the world.

Also many more people are going to university as this from Gil Wyness at the LSE points out.

The UK has dramatically increased the supply of graduates over the last four decades. The proportion of workers with higher education has risen from only 4.7% in 1979 to 28.5% in 2011 (Machin, 2014). Rather than this enormous increase in supply reducing the value of a degree, the pay of graduates relative to non-graduates has risen over the same period: from 39% to 56% for men and from 52% to 59% for women).

However the issue of pay is a complex one as of course overall pay growth has slowed which if the workforce has become better qualified looks even worse. Also there is this which needs some revision I would suggest.

The financing side is much more shambolic though. The upside of the student loans era was supposed to make universities compete more, does anyone believe that now? Next comes the issue that a high interest-rate (6.3%) is used to raise the debt calculated like this by HM Parliament.

Currently more than £16 billion is loaned to around one million higher education students in England each year. The value of outstanding loans at the end of March 2018
reached £105 billion. The Government forecasts the value of outstanding loans to be reach around £450 billion (2017-18 prices) by the middle of this century.

No wonder the Bank of England dropped consumer loans from its credit figures! But more fundamentally debt is supposed to be repaid and yet we know most of this never will be. Yet along the way it will affect those who have it should they look to buy a house or have other borrowing.

The average debt among the first major cohort of post-2012 students to become liable for repayment was £32,000. The Government expects that 30% of current full-time undergraduates who take out loans will repay them in full.

The anthem for this comes from Twenty One Pilots.

Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days
When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out
Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days
When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out

Sometimes developments flow naturally together and we see a clear example of this today. It was only yesterday that I pointed out that the Bank of England puts its telescope to its blind eye on the subject of student loans.

In addition students will be wondering why what are likely to appear large debt burdens to them are ignored for these purposes?

This is particularly material as we know that student debt has been growing quickly in the UK due to factors such as the rises in tuition fees.

Losses mount

I am often critical of the Financial Times but this time Thomas Hale deserves praise for this investigation.

The UK government is set to book a loss of almost £1bn from its largest privatisation of student loans, raising questions over the valuation of tens of billions of pounds of remaining graduate debt.

The most obvious question is why are we privatising these loans at a loss? It was of course the banking sector which saw privatisation of profits and socialisation of losses as fears will no doubt rise that this could be the other way around in terms of timing.

As we look at the detail the news gets even more troubling.

The controversial sale of a batch of student loans this week is expected to raise around £1.7bn, according to a Financial Times analysis of deal documentation. The loans, which had a face value of £3.7bn last year, are part of a total of £43bn in loans made to students up to 2012, which are currently on government books valued at just under £30bn, according to the Department of Education’s latest published accounts, as of the end of March this year.

As you can see not only are those loans not alone but they are being sold at a level below previous mark downs in value. The £3.7 billion face value had already been marked down to £2.5 billion and now we see this.

The deal will raise around £1.7bn in cash through the securitisation process, where assets are packaged together and sold off as bonds to investors. The process is a common feature of financing for student borrowing in the US but has rarely been used in the UK.

This seems odd as why would the UK taxpayer want to capitalise his/her losses?

The government’s loan book sale is dependent on passing a “value for money” test, which is designed to ensure that public assets are not sold too cheaply. The details of the test will not be made public but it is expected to provide a different, lower valuation for the loans compared to those on the DfE accounts.

The sale of the loans is part of a wider government effort to sell public assets “in a way that secures good value for money for taxpayers”, according to a statement on the student loans company website. The government aims to raise a total of £12bn through selling an unspecified amount of pre-2012 student loans over the next five years.

This brings us to a combination of Yes Prime Minister and George Orwell. Whilst it is possible that selling something at half its original value is sensible it needs to be checked carefully especially if it is public money . Also if it is a good deal for the new investors why not keep it?

What has happened to these loans?

Essentially these are loans from the previous decade which only have a rump left and guess which rump?

The transaction is made up of loans issued between 2002 and 2006, on which repayments are linked to income. Around half of students who borrowed during that period had already paid off their loans by the end of the 2015-16 financial year, meaning the pool of debt included in the deal is likely to be of a lower credit quality. Of those graduates with outstanding loans, only 60 per cent made a repayment in the same financial year.

So 40% of the remaining loans are seeing no repayments at present and the pricing here suggests that this will continue. One fear is that the buyers of the loans may try to pressurise students to repay even if they cannot afford to. Also there is the issue of what looks like around 20% of the students from over a decade ago still do not earn more than the £17,775 threshold ( confusingly more recent students seem to have a £21,000 threshold).

The rationale

Carly Simon poses the apposite question

Why?…. Don’t know why?

This is what it is all about. Yet again a wheeze for the national debt numbers.

Part of the motive for the sale is to reduce public debt. The cash generated from the transaction will go towards reducing public sector net debt, which was £1.79tn at the end of October. Unlike cash, student loan assets do not count towards the calculation of public sector net debt.

Comment

This is in my opinion a disaster on a national scale. Let me open with an issue which regular readers will be aware of but newer ones may not. This is the cost or interest on these loans and you may like to note that the most the UK would pay on issuing government debt is ~1.5%. From MoneySavingExpert (MSE ).

The rate used is the previous March’s RPI inflation rate. March 2017’s RPI inflation rate was 3.1% meaning interest charged on student loans for the 2017/18 academic year is between 3.1% and 6.1% depending on whether you’re studying or graduated, and how much you earn.

So at least double and maybe quadruple the alternative which speaks for itself. On this subject I both agree and disagree with MSE. He thinks for some it does not matter than much of this will never be repaid and is in that sense “free.” But you see along the way it matters as there is not only the psychological effect of say a £50k debt but it is also it affects mortgage calculations now. Recently reports have arisen of younger people not joining the NHS pension scheme and I wonder if that is linked to the fact that nurses now have student debts and feel burdened.

Back on the first of August 2016 I explained the problem like this.

We move onto the next problem which is that ever more of this debt will never be repaid which poses the question of what is the point of it? It feels ever more like a rentier society where someone collects all the interest and the takes the loan capital but we then forget that. Another type of borrowing from the future.

It would be much simpler I think to abandon the whole system and go back to providing tuition fees and grants. Also as this reply to the FT from safeside implies perhaps some of the weaker universities should be trimmed.

It would be interesting to see which universities produce graduates who are sub inv grade

It is tempting to suggest we should also write the whole lot off as let’s face it we are writing most of it off along the way anyway. The only major issue I think is how to treat fairly those who have already repaid their loans either in part or in full. It would also end the shambolic way the loans are collected. We seem to have replaced a system which worked with one based on more than few fantasies and if we continue to follow the American way then as I pointed out in August 2016 students can presumable expect this.

It’s 9 p.m. and your phone chimes. You’re among the one in eight Americans carrying a student loan—debts that collectively total nearly $1.4 trillion—and you’ve started to fall behind on your payments.

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About the author

I am a freelance economist who studied at the London School of Economics. My speciality was (and still is) monetary economics. I worked in the City of London for several investment banks and then on my own account over a period of 15 years. After initially working in the government bond department at Phillips and Drew Ltd. I moved on into the derivatives arena with options of all types being a speciality. I never lost my specialisation in UK interest rates and also traded as a local on the London International Financial Futures Exchange where I mostly traded futures and options on future and present UK interest rates. So with my specialisations of monetary economics and konwledge of derivatives I have plenty of expertise to deploy on the financial and economic crisis which has unfolded in recent years.

I have also worked in Tokyo Japan again in the derivatives sphere and would particularly recommend Japanese food with a pork tonkatsu box lunch being one of my favourites. My name is Shaun Richards and as well as writing economics reports and analysis I also give speeches and lectures.Should one or all of these be of interest then please contact me via the contact details on this website.

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